A Previously Unknown Supplier For A Classic Chip

It’s common enough for integrated circuits to be available from a range of different suppliers, either as licensed clones, or as reverse-engineered proprietary silicon. In the case of a gener…

Kernel Hack Brings Windows XP To The 486

The venerable Intel 486 was released in 1989 as the successor to the extremely popular Intel 386. It was the minimum recommended processor for Windows 98.  (Surprisingly, the Windows 95 minimum was…

OLED Display Lets Vintage PC Engage Turbo Mode In Style

Back in the 486 days, it was common to see a “Turbo” button on the front panel of many PCs, which was used to toggle between the CPU’s maximum speed and a slower clock rate that w…

486 Gets Animated Turbo Button Thanks To Arduino

There was a point in time, excruciatingly brief, in which desktop computers often had a large “TURBO” button on their front panel. Some even featured an LCD that would indicate the curr…

Tiny 3D Printed Gaming PC Contains Real Retro Hardware

Emulators are easy and convenient, but for some retrocomputing enthusiasts nothing comes close to running classic software on actual era-appropriate hardware. This can become a problem, though, for…

It’s A 486 Computer, On A Breadboard

Ever since the 1970s, a frequent project has been to take a microprocessor and construct a computer system on a breadboard or stripboard. Usually these machines feature a familiar 8-bit processor s…

TinyLlama Is A 486 In Your Pocket

We love retrocomputing and tiny computers here at Hackaday, so it’s always nice to see projects that combine the two. [Eivind]’s TinyLlama lets you play DOS games on a board that fits i…

Building A Serial Bus To Save An Old Hard Drive

Universal Serial Bus has been the de facto standard for sending information to and from computer peripherals for almost two decades, but despite the word “universal” in the name this wa…

Custom Macintosh With A Real 486

Older Apple computers can often be something of a collector’s item, with the oldest fetching an enormously high price in auctions. The ones from the late ’80s and early ’90s don&#…

Running Modern Linux From A Single Floppy Disk

There was a time when booting Linux from a floppy disk was the norm, but of course, those days are long gone. Even if you still had a working 3.5 inch drive, surely the size of the modern kernel al…